Accelerate your SAP HANA cloud deployment

The cloud is a great platform for proving the HANA business case and the cloud has enabled hundreds, if not thousands, of customers to realize the value of HANA without the lengthy and expensive procurement process of acquiring HANA certified compute nodes. SAP has continually introduced new tools and new partnerships to help accelerate HANA adoption. DMO with System Move is the most recent tool released that enables customers to quickly realize the business value of SAP HANA.

I remember working on a very early version of DMO in 2013 while sitting at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. As with any early software release, early versions of DMO were far from perfect and required our Value Prototyping team to be in constant communication with the developers to work through various issues. DMO is now a very mature product and has been used for thousands of upgrade/conversions and migrations to HANA. One of the limitations of DMO was that the target system had to be up and running and data was transferred via pipes from the source to the target. This made it difficult to use DMO to combine the upgrade/conversion and migration into a single downtime when moving between datacenters or into the cloud. Traditional homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations allowed the use of a DB backup or an export to file. The data could then be easily transferred over the wire or via a shipped NAS device to the target datacenter. Then the data would be imported to complete a system copy. The next step was the upgrade/conversion and migration to HANA using DMO. This process had additional costs and time, because it required a two-step process and more than one downtime to complete the full migration to HANA with an upgrade or conversion.

SAP solved this conundrum sometime in 2014. I was a cloud architect at SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) at this time and we were introduced to an internal solution labeled “DMO to Cloud”. For approximately 3 years, SAP has had an internal version of SUM DMO that could be used to perform a single step upgrade/conversion and migration to HANA by exporting to file, instead of requiring direct connectivity to the target system to transfer the data. This had only been available to use to perform migrations to HEC, until now. SAP has just released SUM 1.0 SP20 and has relabeled the functionality DMO with System Move. More details can be found at 2377305 – Database Migration Option (DMO) of SUM 1.0 SP20

I have been waiting for this functionality to be released for some time and was excited to hear at Sapphire that it was going GA for everyone to use. This means that customers can not only take advantage of the cloud for deploying the target HANA environment, but will also realize faster time to value by completing the conversion/upgrade and migration to HANA and the migration to cloud in a single step.